VII

My confusion of mind, my consternation, as I left the Egyptian tomb, was

pitiable. One thing, one only, I saw with distinctness: The being I

loved best was to be harried and smirched, an innocent victim of the

folly and malignity of others.

"Never," I muttered, "Never--never--never!"

This was all very grim and virile; yet I knew that I could grit my teeth

and mutter Never! from now till the moon blossomed, without in any way

affecting the wretched situation. Words, emotional contortions,

attitudes--would not help Susan; something sensible must be done--the

sooner the better. Something sensible and decisive--but what? There were

so many factors involved, human, incalculable factors; my thought

staggered among them, fumbling like a drunken man for the one right door

that must be found and opened with the one right key. It was no use; I

should never be able to manage it alone. To whom could I appeal? Susan,

for the time being, was out of the question; Maltby had maliciously

betrayed a long friendship. Phil? Why of course, there was always Phil?

Why hadn't I thought of him before?

I turned sharply and swung into a rapid stride. With some difficulty I

kept myself from running. Phil seemed to me suddenly an intellectual

giant, a man of infinite heart and unclouded will. Why had I never

appreciated him at his true worth? My whirling perplexities would have

no terrors for him; he would at once see through them to the very thing

that should at once be undertaken. Singular effect of an overwhelming

desire and need! Faith is always born of desperation. We are forced by

deep-lying instincts to trust something, someone, when we can no longer

trust ourselves. As I hurried down York Street to his door, my sudden

faith in Phil was like the faith of a broken-spirited convert in the

wisdom and mercy of God.

Phil's quarters were on the top floor of a rooming-house for students;

he had the whole top floor to himself and had lived there simply and

contentedly many years, with his books, his pipes, his papers, and his

small open wood fire. Phil is not destitute of taste, but he is by no

means an aesthete. His furniture is of the ordinary college-room

type--Morris chair of fumed oak, and so on--picked up as he needed it at

the nearest department store; but he has two or three really good framed

etchings on the walls of his study; one Seymour Haden in particular--the

_Erith Marshes_--which I have often tried to persuade him to part with.

There is a blending of austerity and subtlety in the work of the great

painter-etchers that could not but appeal to this austere yet finely

organized man.

His books are wonderful--not for edition or binding--he is not a

bibliophile; they are wonderful because he keeps nothing he has not

found it worth while to annotate. There is no volume on his shelves

whose inside covers and margins are not filled with criticism or

suggestive comment in his neat spiderwebby hand; and Phil's marginal

notes are usually far better reading than the original text. Susan

warmly maintains that she owes more to the inside covers of Phil's books

than to any other source; insists, in fact, that a brief note in his

copy of Santayana's _Reason in Common Sense_, at the end of the first

chapter, established her belief once for all in mind as a true thing, an

indestructible and creative reality, destined after infinite struggle to

win its grim fight with chaos. I confess I could never myself see in

this note anything to produce so amazing an affirmation; but in these

matters I am a worm; I have not the philosophic _flair_. Here it is:

"'We know that life is a dream, and how should thinking be more?'

Because, my dear Mr. Santayana, a dream cannot propagate dreams and

realize them to be such. The answer is sufficient."

Well, certainly Susan, too, seemed to feel it sufficient; and perhaps I

should agree if I better understood the answer.... But I have now

breasted four flights to Phil and am knocking impatiently.... He opened

to me and welcomed me cordially, all trace of his parting gruffness of

the other evening having vanished, though he was still haggard about the

eyes. He was not alone. Through the smoke haze of his study I saw a

well-built youngster standing near the fireplace, pipe in hand; some

college boy, of course, whom Phil was being kind to. Phil was forever

permitting these raw boys to cut in upon his precious hours of privacy;

yet he was at the opposite pole from certain faculty members, common to

all seats of learning, who toady to the student body for a popularity

which they feel to be a good business asset, or which they find the one

attainable satisfaction for their tottering self-esteem.

Phil, who had had to struggle for his own education, was genuinely fond

of young men who cared enough for education to be willing to struggle

for theirs. He had become unobtrusively, by a kind of natural affinity,

the elder brother of those undergraduates who were seekers in any sense

for the things of the mind. For the rest, the triumphant majority--fine,

manly young fellows as they usually were, in official oratory at

least--he was as blankly indifferent as they were to him.

"My enthusiasm for humanity is limited, fatally limited," he would

pleasantly admit. "For the human turnip, even when it's a prize

specimen, I have no spontaneous affection whatever."

On the other hand it was not the brilliant, exceptional boy whom he best

loved. It was rather the boy whose interest in life, whose curiosity,

was just stirring toward wakefulness after a long prenatal and postnatal

sleep. For such boys Phil poured forth treasures of sympathetic

understanding; and it was such a youth, I presume, who stood by the

fireplace now, awkwardly uncertain whether my coming meant that he

should take his leave.

His presence annoyed me. On more than one occasion I had run into this

sort of thing at Phil's rooms, had suffered from the curious inability

of the undergraduate, even when he longs himself to escape, to end a

visit--take his hat, say good-by simply, and go. It doesn't strike one

offhand as a social accomplishment of enormous difficulty; yet it must

be--it so paralyzes the social resourcefulness of the young.

Phil introduced me to Mr. Kane, and Mr. Kane drooped his right

shoulder--the correct attitude for this form of assault--grasped my

hand, and shattered my nerves--with the dislocating squeeze which young

America has perfected as the high sign of all that is virile and

sincere. I sank into a chair to recover, and to my consternation Mr.

Kane, too, sat down.

"Jimmy's just come to us," said Phil, relighting his pipe. "He passed

his entrance examinations in Detroit last spring, but he had to finish

up a job he was on out there before coming East. So he has a good deal

of work to make up, first and last. And it's all the harder for him,

because he's dependent upon himself for support."

"Oh," said Jimmy, "what I've saved'll last me through this year, I

guess."

"Yes," Phil agreed; "but it's a pity to touch what you've saved." He

turned to me. "You see, Hunt, we're talking over all the prospects.

Aren't we, Jimmy?"

"Yes, sir," answered Jimmy. "Prof. Farmer thinks," he added, "that I may

be making a mistake to try it here; he thinks it may be a waste of time.

I'm kind of up in the air about it, myself."

"Jimmy's rather a special case," struck in Phil, dropping into a Morris

chair and thrusting his legs out. "He's twenty-two now; and he's already

made remarkably good as an expert mechanic. He left his home here over

six years ago, worked his way to Detroit, applied for a job and got it.

Now there's probably no one in New Haven who knows more than this young

man about gas engines, steel alloys, shop organization, and all that.

The little job that detained him was the working out of some minor but

important economy in the manufacture of automobiles. He suggested it by

letter to the president of the company himself, readily obtained several

interviews with his chief, and was given a chance to try it out.

"It has proved its practical worth already, though you and I are far too

ignorant to understand it. As a result, the president of the company

offered him a much higher position at an excellent salary. It's open to

him still, if he chooses to go back for it. But Jimmy has decided to

turn it down for a college education. And I'm wondering, Hunt, whether

Yale has anything to give him that will justify such a

sacrifice--anything that he couldn't obtain for himself, at much less

expense, without three years waste of time and opportunity. How does it

strike you, old man? What would you say, offhand, without weighing the

matter?"

What I wanted to say was, "Damn it all! I'm not here at this time of

night to interest myself in the elementary problems of Jimmy Kane!" In

fact, I did say it to myself, with considerable energy--only to stop at

the name, to stare at the boy before me, and to exclaim in a swift flash

of connection, "Great Scott! Are you _Susan's_ Jimmy?"

"'Susan's Jimmy'!" snorted Phil, with a peculiar grin. "Of course he's

Susan's Jimmy! I wondered how long it would take you!"

As for Susan's Jimmy, his expression was one of desolated amazement.

Either his host and his host's friend, or he himself--had gone suddenly

mad! The drop of his jaw was parentheses about a question mark. His blue

eyes piteously stared.

"I guess I'm not on, sir," he mumbled to Phil, blushing hotly.

He was really a most attractive youth, considering his origins. I eyed

him now shamelessly, and was forced to wonder that the wrong end of

Birch Street should have produced not only Susan--who would have proved

the phoenix of any environment--but this pleasant-faced,

confidence-inspiring boy, whose expression so oddly mingled simplicity,

energy, stubborn self-respect, and the cheerfulness of good health, an

unspoiled will, and a hopeful heart. He seemed at once too mature for

his years and too naive; concentration had already modelled his

forehead, but there was innocence in his eyes. Innocence--I can only

call it that. His eyes looked out at the world with the happiest candor;

and I found myself predicting of him what I had never yet predicted of

mortal woman or man: "He's capable of anything--but sophistication;

he'll get on, he'll arrive somewhere--but he will never change."

Phil, meanwhile, had eased his embarrassment with a friendly laugh.

"It's all right, Jimmy; we're not the lunatics we sound. Don't you

remember Bob Blake's kid on Birch Street?"

"Oh! Her?"

"Mr. Hunt became her guardian, you know, after----"

"Oh!" interrupted Jimmy, beaming on me. "You're the gentleman that----"

"Yes," I responded; "I'm the unbelievably fortunate man."

"She was a queer little kid," reflected Jimmy. "I haven't thought about

her for a long time."

"That's ungrateful of you," said Phil; "but of course you couldn't know

that."

Question mark and parentheses formed again.

"Phil means," I explained, "that Susan has never forgotten you. It seems

you did battle for her once, down at the bottom of the Birch Street

incline?"

"Oh, gee!" grinned Jimmy. "The time I laid out Joe Gonfarone? Maybe I

wasn't scared stiff that day! Well, what d'y' think of her remembering

that!"

"You'll find it's a peculiarity of Susan," said Phil, "that she doesn't

forget anything."

"Why--she must be grown up by this time," surmised Jimmy. "It was mighty

fine of you, Mr. Hunt, to do what you did! I'd kind of like to see her

again some day. But maybe she'd rather not," he added quickly.

"Why?" asked Phil.

"Well," said Jimmy, "she had a pretty raw deal on Birch Street. Seeing

me--might bring back things?"

"It couldn't," I reassured him. "Susan has never let go of them. She

uses all her experience, every part of it, every day."

Jimmy grinned again. "It must keep her hustling! But she always was

different, I guess, from the rest of us." With a vague wonder, he

addressed us both: "You think a lot of her, don't you?"

For some detached, ironic god this moment must have been exquisite. I

envied the god his detachment. The blank that had followed his question

puzzled Jimmy and turned him awkward. He fidgeted with his feet.

"Well," he finally achieved, "I guess I'd better be off, professor. I'll

think over all you said."

"Do," counselled Phil, rising, "and come to see me to-morrow. We mustn't

let you take a false step if we can avoid it."

"It's certainly great of you to show so much interest," said Jimmy,

hunching himself at last out of his chair. "I appreciate it a lot." He

hesitated, then plunged. "It's been well worth it to me to come East

again--just to meet _you_."

"Nonsense!" laughed Phil, shepherding him skillfully toward the door....

When he turned back to me, it was with the evident intention of

discussing further Jimmy's personal and educational problems; but I

rebelled.

"Phil," I said, "I know what Susan means to you, and you know--I

think--what she means to me. Now, through my weakness, stupidity, or

something, Susan's in danger. Sit down please, and let me talk. I'm

going to give you all the facts, everything--a full confession. It's

bound, for many reasons, to be painful for both of us. I'm sorry, old

man--but we'll have to rise to it for Susan's sake; see this thing

through together. I feel utterly imbecile and helpless alone."

Half an hour later I had ended my monologue, and we both sat silent,

staring at the dulled embers on the hearth....

At length Phil drew in a slow, involuntary breath.

"Hunt," he said, "it's a humiliating thing for a professional

philosopher to admit, but I simply can't trust myself to advise you. I

don't know what you ought to do; I don't know what Susan ought to do; or

what I should do. I don't even know what your wife should do; though I

feel fairly certain that whatever it is, she will try something else.

Frankly, I'm too much a part of it all, too heartsick, for honest

thought."

He smiled drearily and added, as if at random: "'Physician, heal

thyself.' What an abysmal joke! How the fiends of hell must treasure it.

They have only one better--'Man is a reasonable being!'" He rose, or

rather he seemed to be propelled from his chair. "Hunt! Would you really

like to know what all my days and nights of intense study have come to?

The kind of man you've turned to for strength? My life has come to just

this: I love her, and she doesn't love me!

"Oh!" he cried--"Go home. For God's sake, go home! I'm ashamed...."

So I departed, like Omar, through the same door wherein I went; but not

before I had grasped--as it seemed to me for the first time--Phil's

hand.